Mind the Gap

Our blogs are platforms from which we share our experiences, opinions, and views with the online world. For Mind the Gap challenges, we want to hear what you think about a divisive issue. Each challenge will include a poll where you can cast your vote along with your fellow Daily Post participants. After you vote, tell us more about how you feel by expanding on the topic in a blog post. Be sure to visit other participants’ posts to get some healthy discussion going.

To participate, tag your posts with DPchallenge and leave a link to your post in the comments. Please be sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge; obvious attempts to link-bait will be deleted. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight some of our favorites on Freshly Pressed each Friday.

We bloggers are lovers of the written word. As people who read and write online, we are also part of the digital shift in how we consume writing, be it journalism, literature, poetry, or memoirs. As the mode of publishing changes, so do our interactions with what we’re reading.

Not too long ago, ebook sales trumped those of hardcovers for the first time. While the ease of digital books can’t be beat — how else can you hold hundreds of books in your hand so easily? — the physical sensation is undeniably different than cracking open a new paperback.

Around WordPress.com, other bloggers have been talking about ebooks versus hardcovers. Writing My Next Chapter is making the jump to using all ebooks in place of traditional textbooks for the semester, and though Steve of Imagineer-ing has made the switch to an eReader, letting go of hardcovers is a difficult task. While bookshelves display our favorite works of literature like art, wouldn’t the ultimate bibliophile love the ease of carrying hundreds of books in a teensy mobile device?

This week’s Mind the Gap: How do you prefer to read, with an eReader like a Kindle or Nook, or with an old school paperback in hand? Take the poll (below) and then explain your opinion by blogging about it on your site. Tag your post “DPchallenge,” so that we can be sure to find your contribution to the challenge.

I enjoy both e-books and paper books. First discovered e-books when I couldn’t get it in a book store! Well, the book is titled the Future Arrived Yesterday…you know the quote…the medium is the message!

I leaned slightly to the paperback option but I am of the “both” category as well. I consume books at a great rate and sometimes I prefer the ease of ebooks and others the familiarity and beauty of paper.

Have to answer paperbacks – but then I have to get ebooks because I can generally get them at more affordable prices – or at least I can actually get them. Paperbacks are too often “out of print” or simply not easy to find, and cover prices are frequently exorbitant. Of course, some ebooks are also overpriced – so I don’t get either format! Then, too, there’s the space problem with real books.

I believe we are losing a great part of our lives to technological progress. I would rather see technology concentrated on other aspects of our lives and leave us readers alone. Why not focus all this money and effort on much needed causes such as better prosthetics at lower prices to amputees, or curing diseases which destroy lives. How about using technology to find a way to lower the cost of green energy. Leave our heritage alone. What are we going to do when technology dies for some unforeseen reason?

Even though I read ebooks nothing can beat that sense of comfort and joy when you go out to a bookstore and buy a paperback. Holding the book in your hands, feeling its pages, there’s just something divine about it.

Paperbacks give the reader the sense of progress and achievement, as the bookmark travels from the first page to the last, getting “foxed” in the process. Each time you get a paperback in your hand, you physically feel how much you’ve done and how much of it is yet to be covered. An e-book can’t really give you this physical feel, regardless of how many counters or “% read” you have at the bottom of the page ) And overcoming difficulties is one of the basic human needs )

Ebooks may seem more convenient to carry around (which would be nice because I travel a lot), but studies have shown that it interferes with our visual memory. You know how you can recall where on a page you read a passage and find it again relatively easily? It’s not so with ebooks. That’s why I don’t like them.

Yeah, paperbacks smell nice and all that sentimental nostalgia, but my biggest problem is that I always refer back to books and I have to be able to flip through the pages and find information that I might not have marked because at least I remember that it was in chapter so and so, on the right side of the page, about a third of the way down.

I don’t care if I read an e-book or a real book. My Kindle /iPad stays at home. I do not take it anywhere as it do not want to lose it. We have a large room, called hobby room, in the cellar. It has a window, and one wall has 5 bookcases. We have a very large bookcase in our living room, also covering one complete wall. So if we continue buying books (which we never throw away) where shall we put them? Just a sensible question with a sensible answer. We avoid buying books but now download on our respective Kindles. We have some lovely books, but tempo fugit and somewhere you have to make a stop with the book buying. Just a matter of common sense.